How to Brief an SEO Agency Properly
The one part of the arrangement you fully control. An agency can only aim at what it has been told about. Most misdirected work traces back to a brief that never happened. This page also sets out what you are not expected to provide.
The Brief Decides The Work
An agency aims at what it has been told about. Where the telling did not happen, the work gets aimed at your trade in general, which produces activity that is competent and pointed at the wrong customers.
Why this is your lever rather than a chore. You control it entirely.
Most of what determines an outcome is outside your hands. The brief is not. It is the one input you fully decide, disproportionately shaping everything that follows.
What a missing brief looks like later. Work you cannot fault.
Pages produced properly, aimed at searches that bring the wrong enquiries. Nobody did anything badly. The business concludes the agency underperformed when the aim was never set.
Why it usually does not happen. Nobody asks.
Businesses assume the agency will work it out. Agencies frequently do not ask because it delays starting. The gap goes unnoticed by both sides until the work has been running for months.
What this page is not. A list of homework.
Block seven sets out what you do not need to provide, which is more than most people expect. What follows is specific rather than extensive.
What Only You Can Tell Them
Six pieces of information that cannot be found from outside your business. An agency without them is inferring. Inference is where the aim goes wrong.
Which customers are profitable. Not which are largest.
Revenue and profit differ, sometimes sharply. Only your accounts show which work is actually worth having. An agency told this aims at it directly.
Which work you want more of. The objective.
The specific services you would like to be doing more of next year. Without it, the work targets whatever is most searched rather than what you want.
Which work you do not want. The one people skip.
Covered properly in block three, because it is the most useful thing on this page and the least often volunteered.
The geography you can genuinely serve. Where you will travel.
The area you actually cover rather than the area you would like to. Enquiries from beyond it cost you time and produce nothing.
Your capacity. How much more you could take.
Whether you have room for a little more or a great deal changes the objective entirely, which block five covers.
Your seasonality. When you need the work.
Quiet periods and busy ones. Work aimed at filling a quiet season is planned differently from work aimed at general growth. Only you know the pattern.
Tell Them What You Do Not Want
Most businesses have work they would rather not take. Almost none mentions it when briefing. Saying so is more useful than any list of terms you would like to rank for.
What this looks like in practice. Two examples.
A plumber who does not want emergency callouts because they wreck the schedule. A firm that does not want jobs below a certain size because they cost more to administer than they earn. Both are ordinary and neither is obvious from outside.
Why it is more useful than the positive version. It excludes.
Telling an agency what you want points them somewhere. Telling them what you do not want removes a whole set of searches they would otherwise pursue, frequently the highest volume ones in the trade.
Why businesses do not say it. It feels like turning work away.
Naming work you decline sounds ungrateful or over-confident when you are paying for more enquiries. In fact it is the instruction that makes the extra enquiries worth having.
What to include. Three categories.
Services you would rather not sell, customers who are more trouble than they are worth, then anything you only do reluctantly for existing clients.
The effect on the work. Immediate.
An agency that knows what to avoid can redirect effort rather than discovering the problem when the wrong enquiries arrive.
Margin Matters More Than Volume
An agency told which services actually make money will aim at those. One that is not told aims at whatever is easiest to rank for, which is rarely the same thing.
Why the two diverge. Easy and profitable are unrelated.
The searches with the most demand are usually the most competitive and frequently the least profitable, because everybody competes for the obvious work. The profitable searches are often quieter.
What happens without the information. Reasonable guessing.
An agency assumes your most prominent service is the one that matters, because that is what your website suggests. That assumption is right often enough that nobody questions it.
What to supply. A rough ranking.
Not your accounts. An ordering of your services by how much you would like more of each, which encodes the margin without disclosing anything sensitive.
The effect this has. It changes the target.
Effort moves towards quieter searches with better returns rather than towards the loudest ones. Fewer enquiries, worth more each, is usually the better outcome for a small business.
What to say if you are unsure. Say that.
Plenty of businesses have not worked out which services are most profitable. An agency told that will help establish it rather than proceeding on an assumption.
Be Realistic About Capacity
A business already near its limit needs different work from one with empty slots. This is the piece of information most likely to be omitted and most likely to change the plan.
What changes when you are near capacity. The aim narrows.
The objective becomes better work rather than more of it. That means pursuing higher value searches and being willing to lose the low value enquiries entirely, which is a different plan.
What changes when you have room. Breadth.
Wider coverage makes sense, including searches you would decline if you were busy. The work can afford to be less selective.
Why businesses omit it. It sounds like an excuse.
Saying you are close to full while paying for more enquiries feels contradictory. It is not: it is the difference between wanting more work and wanting better work.
What to say if you are actually full. Say it plainly.
A business at capacity may not need this work at all until it expands. A firm worth hiring will tell you so rather than taking the money.
Keep it current. Capacity moves.
A brief given when you were quiet is wrong when you are busy. That is block eight.
Give Them Access Properly
An agency needs access to work. How that access is arranged matters as much as granting it. Set up correctly at the start, it prevents most problems at the end.
What they need. Four things.
The website, your analytics, your search reporting and your business profile. Some arrangements need more. Those four cover most of the work.
The rule that matters. Your name, their access.
Accounts should be registered to your business with the agency added as a user, rather than the agency creating accounts and adding you. Same tools, entirely different position when the arrangement ends.
Why the direction is decisive. Whoever holds it decides.
If the accounts are theirs, they choose what happens to years of history at the point you leave. If they are yours, you simply withdraw access. The contract page covers what should be written down.
Delays cost more than people realise. Work stalls silently.
An agency waiting on access cannot start. The waiting rarely appears in a report. Slow access is one of the commonest causes of a disappointing first month.
What to check now. Existing accounts.
If a previous supplier set anything up, establish whose name it is in before starting with anybody new.
What You Do Not Need To Provide
Everything above concerns your business rather than search. There is a great deal you are not expected to supply. An agency requiring it is putting its own job on you.
You do not need to understand search. At all.
That is what you are paying for. A firm expecting you to arrive informed about the subject has misunderstood which side of the arrangement it is on.
You do not need to arrive with keywords. That is the work.
Establishing what your customers search is a core part of what an agency does. A list from you is welcome as background and it is not an input they should require.
You do not need opinions about technique. Or about tools.
How the work is done is their judgement to apply. Being asked to choose between approaches you cannot assess is being asked to make their decisions.
You do not need a written document. A conversation is fine.
None of this requires a formal brief. A proper conversation covering the six things in block two, with somebody taking notes, is entirely sufficient.
What an agency should be doing. Asking.
A firm that does not ask about margin, capacity or the work you decline is planning to guess. Their questions are the mechanism. The process page covers where briefing sits in the sequence.
Keep Briefing After The Start
Businesses change and briefs do not update themselves. An agency working to instructions from eighteen months ago is aiming carefully at something that has moved.
What changes without anybody mentioning it. Five things.
A new service, a service dropped, a price change, a new location and a change in capacity. Each alters what the work should target and none reaches the agency automatically.
Why nobody tells them. They feel internal.
A business does not think of its own operational decisions as agency news. From outside, though, the agency has no window into any of it.
The commonest example. Getting busy.
A business that has filled up still receives work aimed at maximum volume, because the brief said growth and nobody revised it. The enquiries then become an irritation.
What prevents it. A regular conversation.
This is why a defined contact cadence matters beyond politeness. We commit to an update every three weeks. The practical function of that is catching exactly these changes before they cost anything.
What to raise each time. One question.
Ask yourself whether anything about the business has changed since you last spoke. How to manage your SEO agency covers the ongoing side.
Tell us the
work you do
not want.
It is the most useful instruction a business can give and almost nobody volunteers it. We will ask about margin, capacity and seasonality before proposing anything, because those decide what the work should aim at rather than what is easiest to reach.
What we commit to in writing:
Local £350 a month fixed. National £1,550 a month. Published rather than quoted on request.
Every guide.
One practice.
What an agency is, whether to buy at all, which model suits you, how to vet one, what things cost, what should be in a contract and how to work with them afterwards.
